Jamie Hilder has his MA in English from Simon Fraser University and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of British Columbia. His work has been shown in Vancouver at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Artspeak, and the Audain Gallery.

Island Developments, a collaboration between Vancouver artists Brady Cranfield and Jamie Hilder, is a research-based installation project that investigates contested sites of imagination to bring up dialogues of nationality, utopianism, political and art histories. The installation will have four components: an architectural model of the republic of Rose Island (the independent nation had Esperanto as its official language); a video of a rock islet off the coast of Vancouver (proposed site of a project by American artist Robert Smithson which did not take place due to political and environmental protest); a video of a children’s choir singing in Esperanto; and a display of archival documents and a library.

The work of Jamie Hilder and Heather Passmore collectively examines memory, transience and physical movement, both habitual and occasional. Approaching individual travel through situationist references and archival material, Hilder and Passmore’s works mark histories of movement in urban space and the habits resulting from and reflecting such environments. The exhibition title, Banlieusard, connotes the commuter. Artists such as Van Gogh and Monet who were working in Paris at the end of the 19th century, were enormously interested in the suburbs, or banlieu, and sought to represent the modern spaces between city and country. The traveller between these spaces is a flaneur of sorts, as posited by Hilder’s personal travels and Passmore’s appropriated ones.

Jamie Hilder’s large wall drawing depicts his movements through the urban environment over the course of a year. It is a document of the performance of daily life and highlights its banality. Loosely modeled after the map included in Internationale Situationniste No.1 (published in 1958), Hilder’s drawing marks paths traveled based on frequency, darker lines indicating habitual movement. The spectacle of urban/suburban daily life is reinacted and mapped by Hilder as a caricature of the concept of poetic movement and the psychogeographical experiments of the situationists.

Heather Passmore works with found archives and collections. In contrast to Hilder’s personal travels, Passmore appropriates another’s personal images of travel. Her Travel Shots, a slide projection piece, chronicles an individual’s international travels, generic photographic slides largely taken from the inside of a car of the sights and landscapes beyond. The slides have degraded over time and offer a strained window onto the world, a vision slowly being lost. Paralleling human aging and loss of sight, the images in Travel Shots reveal memories and vision to be as unstable, fleeting and delicate as the medium that seeks to capture them.

How does writing, as a practice, inform contemporary art and vice versa? Speakeasy, a semi-annual series of talks and presentations, interrogates Artspeak’s mandate to encourage dialogue between visual art and writing. From text based art, visual poetry, and parallel texts to activities of publication and research, how do writing practices and concerns intersect with contemporary art practices? This multipart series will take place at Artspeak from January to April 2010.

The fifth event in the series is a conversation between artist/historian Jamie Hilder and writer/critic Michael Turner that examines “conceptual writing” contextualized within 1960s conceptual art, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and local Vancouver practices (particularly the relationship between Kootenay School of Writing and Artspeak). Jamie Hilder has his MA in English from Simon Fraser University and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of British Columbia. His work has been shown in Vancouver at the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Artspeak, and the Audain Gallery. Michael Turner is an award-winning author of fiction, criticism, and song. As the Ellen and Warren Tallman Simon Fraser University Writer-in Residence, he curated “to show, to give, to make it be there”: Expanded Literary Practices in Vancouver, 1954-1969 at the SFU Gallery (Burnaby). His most recent work, 8×10, was nominated for the 2010 Ethel Wilson BC Book Prize for Fiction.

Rethinking how civic space is defined, Speakeasy: Territory is a series of talks and readings that address the mutable definition of “territory.” Questioning whether “territory” is a spatial, geographic, political, economic, or social construct, urban space will be taken up as a contestable subject.

In 2005 Artspeak hosted the inaugural Speakeasy: Serial Space. Through six presentations, this event approached space as an endless repetition of particular spaces that appear throughout our conventions of “urban” or “nature.” Speakeasy: Territory series encourages artists, writers, and activists to continue this thinking within urban terrain, building on the past and on the exhibition Territory held at Artspeak, Presentation House Gallery, and public sites around the city in the summer of 2006.

Framing individual experience, the publication Banlieusard approaches the liminal territory of the commuter or traveler. Artists Jamie Hilder and Heather Passmore and author Anne Lesley Selcer map subjective knowledge and a history of movement in urban and suburban space. Together in this publication, the works reconsider the spectacle of daily life, memory, the real, and the problematics of aesthetics through nostalgized strategies to offer a strained window into quotidian vision.

The format of the publication takes its queue from mapping, both the road map and serialized image collecting, to reflect an experience that is textual and palpable. As Hilder’s work reconsiders (and aestheticizes) Situationist mapping methods, the publication ultimately turns the maps into objects. Passmore’s work presents the distant geography of a solitary roadtripper while Selcer’s text inhabits the potential narrative and reimbues the images with subjective observations.

The sightseer’s practice (collecting sights which have already been seen), suggests that memory is always a recollection. His work murmurs softly, “technology designs history.”
-Anne Lesley Selcer

Banlieusard is published on the occasion of an Artspeak exhibition of the same name that included work by Jamie Hilder and Heather Passmore (June 11 and July 16, 2005).